Hi, and again thanks for your information and help.
Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
Collections should be created the same for both devices if they have the same books on them. The collection management is done for the books on the device that calibre can match to books in the library. If you are creating collections for series and one of the devices does not have any books in a particular series on it, then the collection will not be created.
|
Any given book should be on only one of the readers. I'll probably load a dupe now and then by mistake, but I can't think of a situation where I'd do it intentionally.
Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
There is one trap with multiple devices and collections. Kobo syncs the collections between devices. But, it doesn't sync anything about sideloaded books. That means if you create a collection on one device with a sideloaded book in it, after syncing both devices, the collection will appear on the other device. But, it will be empty. The trap is that if you have the option "Delete empty bookshelves" on in the driver, the collection will get deleted from the device with the empty collection.
|
Thanks for the empty bookshelves tip - I was pondering whether to turn that on, since I'd noticed that empties just hang around on the device until I notice and manually delete them.
The older eReader software/firmware only has collections, not series & collections as separate entities. Until a couple of days ago, when I loaded new books that had a series defined in Calibre, a collection was automatically built by Calibre using the series name. I had never noticed that this is a two-step process, as you explained, but it did work seamlessly.
And now... it doesn't, on my older reader at least. (I'll need to double-check the new one, though I think yesterday's advice got that one working - which again makes me wonder if it's a case of backward incompatibility... I don't see anything about a firmware cut-off level in the Calibre features list, but that doesn't preclude the possibility.)
As an experiment, I just added 3 books in a new series (SeriesA for brevity) and 2 additional books for a series which already existed on the eReader (SeriesB).
- When Calibre told me they were on the device, I ejected the eReader from Calibre, let it do its processing, then looked at the entries. As expected, each entry showed, for example
SeriesName - 03 - Title [filename format as set up in plugboard]
[the series/collection data is not yet added]
author name
- I reconnected to Calibre, let it do its job processing (which showed no errors), then ejected the eReader again. This time, the missing middle line was filled in
Series Name - 03 - Title [as before]
series name & number now filled in [as expected]
author name
But if I look in the Collections tab, no entry for SeriesA has been created, and the 2 new books are not showing up in the listing for SeriesB.
If I hook it up into Calibre again, and look at "Show book in the main memory of the device", it shows the same thing. For all 5 of the newly added books, the "collections" column is empty. But if I page down to check the series books which were added using Calibre v5.17 (or earlier), those fields contain the series name.
Believe me, I did not create several hundred series-name collections manually - Calibre did it for me transparently, but at v5.33.2 has ceased to do so. And man, I really hope there's just another unknown-to-me parameter that needs flipping, because I'm not looking forward to needing to do it all manually from now on.... (And there are SOOO many potential rabbitholes attached to the thought of trying to upgrade the reader firmware - starting with an image of it deciding that my many-many books are nothing but sideloads and so can be deleted on a whim. Assuming it's even possible to upgrade the reader's firmware without doing a full factory reset?)